I know, I know.  I’ve been slacking. It’s been over two weeks since my last blog post. Fear not though, because I have still been keeping the good people of Boston well fed and sugared up. I’ve just been a little late to the game with actually sitting down and writing the recipes up.  But I have a good excuse. I’ve been out living life and just have not been in front of my personal laptop for a while. (That’s a good excuse right?) Right now I am actually writing this post 38,000 feet over the Midwest on my way back from San Francisco. That trip will be documented in my next blog post this week.

So time traveling back a week, I first made these White Chocolate S’mores bars for a big backyard BBQ that we threw as a very belated backyard housewarming. I could be a professional party thrower, because I just love hosting people. Does it stress me out and I run around for hours before like a crazy person on crack? Sure, but the adrenaline fuels my baking. And I baked up quite a storm for this party. I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with different S’mores recipes lately – cookies, bars, and even cheesecakes. I saw these bars on Pinterest and decided to give them a try, of course adding my own twist to them.

These were a huge hit at the party. Both delicious before or after taking a swing at the Pinata. The first time I baked these I tried a 11×7 pan, which resulted in the middle being pretty gooey and uncooked, but people really seemed to like that. Although after a few beers (or 10) most things taste pretty good. When I decided to make these again for my coworkers last week, I did them in a 13×9 pan which I personally think they turned out much better, although I could have undercooked them just a bit to make everybody happy. A word to the wise before you start making these, be sure to check that you have all the ingredients. 5 cups of flour and 4 eggs is a lot more than we usually need for regular cookie recipes.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup butter, softened
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 4 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 5 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 6 graham cracker sheets
• 1 (10-ounce bag) white chocolate chips
• 2 cups mini marshmallows

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cream together butter and sugar. Add in eggs and vanilla and mix well.

Step 2: In a separate bowl, sift together flour, salt and baking soda. Add the dry ingredients to the wet batter and mix until well incorporated.

Step 3: Grease a 13×9 glass baking dish with non-stick spray. Take half of the dough and spread it out evenly on the bottom of the pan.

Step 4: Separate the Graham Cracker sheets (you may need more than 6) and spread out evenly to cover the dough.

Step 5: Top with marshmallows.

Step 6: Top that with the white chocolate chips, spreading them evenly.

Step 7: Now here is the tricky part. You need to use the remaining dough to cover the top of the bars. I try to press out sections of the dough between my hands so that it is flat, and spread those out, and then use little pieces of dough to fill in any of the gaps.

Step 8: Bake at 350 degrees for about 20-25 minutes. You will need to cut into one to check the middle and see the doneness but I think 25 minutes fully baked mine in the 13×9 pan.

Now for the absolute hardest part. You must let these cool before cutting into them. Unless you need to do some quality assurance testing in which case you can just dig right in with a fork. These were such a hit at the party and an even bigger hit at work when I remade them on Tuesday.

The epicly long weekend of fun and awesomeness kicked off (literally) with some Friday Night Lights football at my alma matter Boston College cheering on the Eagles.

 

Some of the food highlights from the backyard bash included these little mini pulled pork sliders. The hardest part of these was finding the slider buns, but we did the pulled pork in the slow cooker the night before and they were a huge hit.

And a summer staple has been our grilled pizzas, so we whipped up five varieties of these.

And we wrapped up the epicly long weekend of fun and awesomeness seeing one of my favorite shows, Wicked. It was (wicked) awesome.

The next blog post coming soon will highlight my recent trip to California AND even more importantly, it will be my 100^th recipe on TheSaltedCookie.com